The best laid plans of mice and men…

Entries Tagged as 'Browser / Web Browser'

So you all have the new version of Internet Explorer and Firefox right?

I know, it’s hard to tell them apart now — they all look like Chrome… and I’m not convinced that usability has been improved; seems to me more of a “me too” change than any real move forward.

Of course, under the hood, IE9 does a much better job of actually rendering web sites correctly (how could it do a worse job). And of course all of them now support HTML5 (well, at lest sort of support HTML5).

Personally I don’t understand why the user interface to the browser needs to keep changing… after all, it’s the web sites the browser presents that most people care about using, not the browser itself.

Sure, for the most part you can set the options in the browsers to look like the older interface — but maybe during the install the question should be ask if you want the new look or not (because it is the default).

The bottom line; it’s different… not better — and I personally am getting tired of senseless changes that really accomplish nothing much more than “putting lipstick on a pig” — and we know how well that works out.

And in closing — could someone please explain to me why in version nine of Internet Explorer it still doesn’t have spell check built in? That certainly would be a feature worth upgrading for.

I’ve been using the Chromium browser a fair amount lately, and while it takes some getting used to, it’s quite an admirable browser.

Initially I installed Chromium in order to test web sites under it to make sure I didn’t need to handle any glaring issues (like is often needed with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Opera); but it seem to render most everything almost identically to FireFox and Safari (though there’s definite differences in the timing of the rendering).

For the most part I work on web pages that use fairly simply JavaScript to alter the appearance or provided better user interaction (Web2.0), I really know very little about HTML5 (I’ve run some tests on various browsers — but let’s leave HTML5 to those who really know something of substance).

I don’t know if it’s because it’s what I’m used to or because the human engineering in FireFox is better… but it certainly feels more natural using FireFox to browse and download (plus I like the “Page Info” and the “Error Console” tools a great deal).

One other thing I like about FireFox is that it’s ostensibly the same experience on Windows, OS-X, and Kubuntu… and it’s not the default browser on any of them — of course I can same the same thing about Chromium (well, except for OS-X).

Chromium, though, really takes a slightly different approach to browsing the web; and I think the developers really felt like their approach was simpler… and maybe it is. After all, humans do not have any innate ability to use a particular tool — they have to learn, and maybe the FireFox tool has become somewhat ingrained in the tool-box of any internet user since it builds on the original web browser (Mosaic) and really has never attempted any large paradigm shift.

Chromium also presents the feel of something larger than a browser (and it is — after all, it’s a fundamental part of the Chromium OS project as well); and perhaps that’s what makes it feel slightly alien no mater what environment you run it in (of course, to me, Chromium OS feels very fairly alien in itself — but then again, I’ve only run hacked builds, so we shouldn’t draw too many conclusions about the OS just yet).

One thing I’ve fairly confident of is that Google will evolve Chromium until it has a reasonably large share of the market (I think Wave might be the only Google project that was abandoned — and I suspect that will find itself re-incarnated in some future Google effort).

While I don’t see the “resistance is futile” tag line on Chromium any time soon, I think it’s probably worth taking a look at — you might find it less alien than I do — and it certainly seems to work well as a browser (once you learn what buttons to press and how to hold your head).

Both Apple (in an essay by Steve Jobs) and Microsoft (from the general manager of IE) have put a stake in the ground — the future of the web is in HTML5 and Adobe Flash is nothing more than a transitional technology that had no place in the future… of course with that, Microsoft has also indicated the IE9 won’t be supported by Windows XP, so it too obviously will have no place (in their minds) in the future.

I would agree that Flash has no place in the future; of course, I felt it had no place in the past either… but the glut of mediocre web designers and the masses need for eye candy seemed to give Flash a leg up in the past, and my bet is will continue to keep it alive long into the future.

Additionally, my guess is Windows XP will do just fine — after all, you can run Operate, FireFox, Chrome, and Safari today on that platform, and all of those will likely continue to develop for and support Windows XP in the future. All of those are far better browsers than IE is today, and I suspect that’s a pretty safe bet for tomorrow.

In fact, Chrome, Opera, and Safari all support HTML5 today (and score 100/100 in the ACID3 tests)…